I once asked a good friend of mine, a police captain with
the New York Police Department (NYPD) to define his job. John Culley was a
career cop. He had joined as a patrolman at the age of 18 and at the time
was the youngest captain on the force. We had become friends over a period
of nine months while I had been making a television documentary on homicide
in the South Bronx.

Of course, before this experience of working with
real-life cops, films and television had shaped my vision of the New York
cops. As a majority of us are law-abiding people, our perception of the
police and police work comes mainly through the media – either films, TV,
novels or newspaper reports. The image of the policeman is shaped partly by
the screen and also by our emotional reaction to the story. Good cops/bad
cops, they’re all playing their parts in this process. Naturally, it
depends on the ‘star’ too. A likeable Harrison Ford makes us like
policemen, a bad Richard Gere makes us distrust and fear them.

Cops have always been popular screen/TV/fictional
characters. If we go back to the silent era, they were made fun of as the
Keystone Cops and Charlie Chaplin was always on the wrong side of the
uniformed police officer on the beat. Their mere profession made for
gripping drama, unlike say accountants or doctors or writers. They hunted
down killers and bad guys in real life which made their stories easily
transferable to the screen. Theirs are action filled lives, not intellectual
or technical, and ‘action’ makes for good cinema. And even if the movies
did go cerebral on their cops, like the brilliant A Touch of Evil by the
genius director Orson Welles, the action remained gripping. The detective in
that film, played by Welles, is so evil that we cheer when he is finally
gunned down.

Each visual experience of these filmed stories altered
our emotions and our ideas of the policeman. They built into us either trust
or distrust of the cop. Very few of us actually come into contact with
policemen. Maybe for a traffic violation but otherwise he remains remote and
distant, a person we don’t usually socialise with, whatever our society.
They’re always beyond the normal social intercourse of cocktail parties,
dinners, a round of golf. Except the very high up officers, police
commissioners and above.

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nd if we should
come in contact with working cops, it’s always because a bad thing –
robbery, rape, murder, assault – has happened to us. At these times, we’re
under enormous stress and, often as not, look on the police as callous and
indifferent to the pain and suffering we’re going through. We even grow
bitter when the police do not catch the criminal. They do it so quickly, so
logically on television and in the movies!

I have to admit I had always seen the darker side of the
New York Police. They didn’t exactly have unblemished reputations and
their street presence was intimidating. Big heavy men with large guns
strapped to their waists, belts sagging under that weight and night stick,
cuffs, torches.

I considered the French Connection one of the most ‘realistic’
police films (and it did win the Oscar). I assumed the reality from the
gritty New York street scenes, the hardness of the police and the fact that
in the end the criminal gets away. Also ‘Popeye’ Doyle kills a fellow
officer by mistake but has no regrets. That sounded all so real. In many
ways, it was. Popeye Doyle was a real-life New York detective and the story
was real. The film drew on his experiences, used the same locales and the
same kinds of characters. Hollywood does have that ability to make fiction
look as hard and authentic as a documentary. It knows real life makes for a
good film. Another real life cop story Hollywood made around that time was
Serpico. Serpico was the detective who blew the whistle on his corrupt
colleagues and nearly ended up getting killed by them.

‘Reality’ is an odd word to use when looking at such
a universally familiar character on film or television. It’s as far from
it in real life as anything else we see on screen. The screen compresses
time to suit our convenience, a couple of hours in which the cop solves the
murder and hunts down the bad guy. Popeye worked for months – tedious,
grinding work to get his French connection. There certainly wasn’t such a
dramatic car chase either in his real life.

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n contrast,
Kojack the popular television series, was merely entertainment with a
lollipop sucking police captain who dressed too well for the job. The
streets were more pastel coloured and the cops all good and just men. More
recently we have, I guess, a somewhat realistic television series in NYPD
Blue – the drab government colours, desks jammed against each other, the
chaos of people coming and going, the phones ringing, the banter among the
characters. We also get glimpses of what their lives are like off-duty when
we see them with their girlfriends, wives and friends. These are just quick
glimpses, a taste of what it must be like to be in a cop’s real life. But
it’s never for too long because we want to see the cops back in action.

American cops dominate films and television worldwide
only because of Hollywood’s power. But every society has its own vision of
what its policemen are like. In Britain the image began softly with good old
‘bobby’ shows like Dixon of Dock Green. This was how the British first
imagined their policemen to be – uncle-like characters dispensing warmth
and good advice. But over the decades as the media intruded more into the
lives of real policemen, revealing corruption, racism and brutality, this
image changed. From Dixon, British television moved to stripping away the
rosy tinted image of their policeman to show him in a new reality.

In Indian cinema (it’s too early to discover any trend
in television series), the policeman also began his screen life as a good
man, battling the forces of evil. And like the British counterpart, we have
gradually evolved to see him as a dark, more corrupt figure in our society.
In fact, I read somewhere that the policeman’s union was extremely upset
about the depiction of policemen in Indian cinema. We had gone from light to
dark without understanding the grey realities of police work.

I do wonder whether the policeman changed or we changed
in the darkness of the cinema and in front of the flickering light of
television? We moved from innocent belief in their goodness to the cynical
vision of their corruption and brutality.

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et over this
time, I doubt whether policemen and their work did really change. Right from
the very start of civilisation someone or a group of men, were made the chowkidars
of that society. They were given the authority to deal with the crimes,
track down the perpetrators and deliver them to a judicial system. Once we
hand over authority to someone to control us, this immediately puts him
above us. We are expected to obey the laws he has been asked to enforce, one
way or another. For centuries, the criteria for recruiting these cops was
almost always the same – they had to be physically capable of controlling
violent people and they needed a limited amount of intelligence.

Which brings me back to my question to Captain Culley. He
defined his job as: ‘We’re the legal muscle employed by society to
control the illegal muscle on the streets.’ I always considered that a
wise answer. Muscle to equal muscle and a job not for the squeamish. Cops
come from the very same streets as the illegal muscle that they fight to
control. It’s chance they became cops, not criminals. A detective I knew
well, Andy Lugo, was born and raised in Spanish Harlem, a tough
neighbourhood. He told me that most of the kids he grew up with were either
dead or behind bars.

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n films and
television, we seldom ever see the social class from which the cops come
from. There’s no time in such action films. But, in every society, the men
and women who become cops come from the same neighbourhoods as the
criminals. (Here I’m talking about the patrolmen, the constable, and not
the higher ranks). Criminals/cops are two sides of the same coin.

Films romanticise these ordinary lives, and that’s to
be expected. In real life, the cops I came across led hard lives. New York
is never an easy city to police and back then it had one of the highest
crime rates in the world. This took its toll on the men I worked with on my
documentary.

They paid a high personal price for being detectives. A
good 90 per cent had broken marriages. Wives could not bear the tension of
waiting at home, the irregular hours, and the violence and, worse still, the
comraderie of the cops among themselves. They moved in tight circles,
drinking in the same bars, hanging out in the precinct, speaking their own
special language. They needed this companionship of themselves, as those
outside never understood their lives. Real life for them was the long,
boring tedium of stakeouts, hanging around for days in the courts, enormous
reams of paperwork. But interspersed with this was the daily danger, the
adrenaline of fear and the chase, sometimes the gun battle, then the slow
descent back to normality of routine.

Cops see only the under belly of society. They see the
many ways in which people kill each other and they use evasive words to
describe these ways – ‘iced’, ‘taken out’, ‘chopped’, ‘floater’,
‘jumper’, ‘whacked’. In all my time they never said someone was ‘killed’.
Apart from death they nurse the wounded, some horribly so, they have to
break the news to relatives and friends, they see the scum of con-men,
thieves, pimps, drug pushers. It’s not surprising that slowly the division
in their lives blur into a grey reality. Their daily business is crime and
the men and women they meet and mix with daily are criminals, lawbreakers.

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few of the
detectives I got to know ended up as criminals too. They were all accused of
taking bribes or making money in an illegal way. One ended up in prison,
while the others were fired from the force. Hollywood made a film called
Prince of the City about an elite band of detectives who investigated drugs.
I met one of the ‘prince’s’ – in prison. He explained frankly: ‘There
was so much cash lying around, suitcases of them, and when I looked at my
life and what these guys were making, I couldn’t resist taking some of it.
So I got caught.’

The transition back, from legal muscle to illegal muscle,
can be just as quick and easy.

By the time I ended my documentary, I looked on the ‘cop’
film in a very different light. They’re only entertainment, and they have
nothing at all, no matter how real it can be made to look, to do with a cop’s
real life. His is a world filled with mean streets and there’s little
glamour or even glory found on it. Unless he can make a film deal about one
of his experiences and then, of course, no one would ever recognise his life
story.